Lessons Learned from Building my Website/Blog so Far

Post date: Aug 7, 2015 12:19:13 AM

Post for August 7: The law of Unintended Consequences

I’ve been building websites for a number of years: however, most of them were for academic purposes or for a specific audience/genre, such as the Ruth Suckow website, which I’ve been managing for half a dozen years. I’ve built a couple of micro-blogs on Tumblr, played with a blog for the Suckow group, and juggled several social media accounts. However, this past summer, I decided that I wanted to do something more: a website devoted to technology and writing. Those efforts became Geeky Grandma.

As I debated the options, I knew that I needed a reliable, free platform. I considered blogger, which is a popular pick. I thought about the types of content that I wanted to include, and decided that blogger would not fit my needs after all. Then, I started to explore Google Sites and discovered a template that included a blog. Perfect!

Website tools are like the tools in your garage: they are not necessarily better than one another, but when you need a hammer, a screwdriver won’t work. To archive content, Google Sites has some real advantages. However, for someone else Blogger would be perfect. They are both free tools, both good products, and both are user-friendly. It all depends on what one wants to accomplish. I wanted a place to post materials already created, house a blog, and provide resources for writers.

Google Sites has several styles of web pages available: the regular web page, file cabinet, and announcements. The file cabinet page is great for archiving things and making them easy for your user to download and read, or use. I used that for archiving my Technology Columns for the Cedar Valley Business Monthly, and gathered them by year.

The announcement page is like a mini blog. It allows you to post a series of entries that can be accessed via RSS, like a blog. So people can sign up for that set of posts. In addition, this template included a blog on the home page.

I was excited and began to lay out my plan for the website, creating and naming pages and adding content. I got the Technology columns added to the File cabinet style pages by year, starting in 2012 and going up to the current year. I also began to write the first few blog posts.

However, what I didn’t realize is that since this template was a hybrid “critter,” it was acting a little like a blog and a little like Google Sites! The titles of my blog posts were showing up on the navigation bar to the left as if they were “real” pages on the website. It would take a couple more weeks before I got really concerned, as the list grew longer and longer.

Now what to do? I didn’t want to ask people to navigate through so many links/pages. Would I need to now create a blog and link it to the Google Sites website? Could I transfer those entries already done? Do I just create a separate blog and use the title to connect the two web spaces? Would anyone notice?

I looked for ideas in the Google Sites Help pages and pondered things, looking for the simplest solution both for me and my readers. Then, I realized I had the solution. I would create a new page on the website, add it to the navigation bar, name it Blog Posts for Geeky Grandma, and transfer the posts there. Fortunately, it worked!

In the 25+ years I’ve been teaching at the college level, I’ve experienced the law of unintended consequences many times, and I have made more than my share of mistakes. I’ve tried things that didn’t work as neatly as hoped, often because they were at the beta stage of things and not really “ready for prime time!” Fortunately, I have learned to have a thick skin and a good sense of humor (and a bag of Dove chocolates in the drawer is also an attitude booster). When we do something new, we are bound to find some unintended consequences along the way. When we do, it is important not to panic or give up.

I’m having fun with my website/blog and know that at least a handful of people read my posts. Later on, I will work on getting those numbers up: right now, I am focused more on getting content in place and the discipline of meeting my own weekly deadline. So far, it is enormously satisfying, and I have always had several ideas for topics. Even better? I’m enjoying writing and revising my posts and feel it is preparing me for bigger things. Keep reading: I am going to keep writing. For those of you who are writers, too—keep writing as well!

NOTE: For those of you wondering what RSS means, it refers to Really Simple Syndication or more loosely, subscribing to a blog. You can read blogs several ways: by going to the website periodically or signing up to get it through an RSS reader like Feedly or Bloglovin. You can sign up to get new posts sent to your email inbox.

For more reading, http://www.problogger.net/what-is-rss/ What is RSS?

Last Updated August 6, 2015